RE: Documents, Cars, Hills, and Valleys

 
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-rdf-interest-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:www-rdf-interest-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Thomas B.
> Passin  
> 
> Topic maps attempt to disambiguate this case by letting you 
> specifiy if the subject of discourse is the page itself or 
> the subject of the page.  Of course, it may happen that the 
> subject of the page is not clear, or that it has many 
> subjects.  In Topic maps, a fall-back onto human judgement is 
> always assumed.  

That would be good enough. The semantic web, such as it is, should
be an augmentation to people.


> My take on this is that we are so far from understanding how 
> people to all the disambiguating that they do, and how they 
> can come to understand the meanings of words from common 
> usage and circular definitions, that it will be a long time 
> before we can get the computers to do it except for simple 
> cases - Cyc not withstanding.

Yes if you insist on formal representations, ontologies and logical
inference, which is kind of where RDF is going and why I mention
numerical methods as an option. Roboticists and AI researchers
dealing without representation are making progress. Perhaps, to
paraphrase Rod Brooks, the web is its own best model.

Bill de hÓra

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Received on Wednesday, 24 April 2002 10:05:20 UTC